Sandbox Love
by TaciturnDancer
Summary: You wonder what it means, that while most people have given up trying to compare you two, you still do, time and time again. Melissa/Spencer


_**(one)**_

You're eleven when you stop seeing her on a regular basis. That year brings many changes for the both of you. It's her first year at Penn, and your first at Rosewood's one and only middle school. For her, it brings stress and work and success. For you, it brings only awkwardness, your first A-, and the onset of puberty.

_**(two)**_

Two years later, and you barely see her anymore. She moves out, and into her boyfriend's apartment in the city. That's when your parents start measuring you against the footprints she's left behind. But they're too big, and you're still just a long-limbed kid, and you begin to resent the face you can no longer recall from memory alone.

_**(three)**_

Her final year at Penn, she only comes home briefly for Christmas. She shows up in a strapless dress and designer heels, takes one look at you, and smirks. You look at yourself in the hall mirror, with your too-big nose and your flat chest and your spindly legs and the little doll's dress your mother picked out for you and you want to cry. When Melissa has safely commanded the attention of your parents, you slink away to your room and do just that. You're barely fourteen.

_**(four)**_

It's your first year of high school, and you're finally finished puberty. Things fit better, and you're not as emotional, and boys have started to notice you. You don't see Melissa at all anymore. Sometimes, if you close your eyes and block out the words of your parents, you forget she ever existed. And you start to believe it. You're Spencer Hastings, and you're forging your own legacy. Still, you can't ignore her existence all of the time, but you comfort yourself with the fact you're accomplishing things your sister could never even dream of. Sports had never been her strong point, and interning for the mayor is no small accomplishment either. You wonder what it means, that while most people have given up trying to compare you two, you still do, time and time again.

_**(five)**_

She comes back to Rosewood on a hot summer night and you wonder how she looks so different when she hasn't changed a thing. It's the first time in nine months you've seen her in anything other than childhood photographs. You don't know how it's possible that she looks so like you, but so different. Her hair is dark, long waves, and her eyes sharp with wit. And then she's talking to you, and, oh. Her words are all soft touches and melodic tones, and you trip over a response, your gravel voice scrubbing away the skin where she touched. The grating sting doesn't stop all evening, not until she's gone to her friend's apartment, and you stand there, bones bare and heart tripping, trying to find your voice to say goodbye. If you had found it, then maybe it would've been enough to wear through the bloody muscle until it stopped. But you don't, and she turns and smiles at you before getting in the car, and then your flesh clings to your frame again. Blood pours through your ears. When you finally retire for the night, you whisper her name and it is a song.

_**(six)**_

The night Ali goes missing, Melissa drives all the way from the city to see you. You didn't even ask for her to come; didn't talk to her at all. If you had, you would have insisted she stay where she was. Maybe she even would have. But she's there, not even an hour after the missing persons report is filed. The rest of your friends are mildly confused, but they don't question it when you leave with her. You don't remember the space in time between then and when she half-carries you through the door to your room and helps you onto the bed. You're still slightly drunk, and you want to cry, so you do. She holds you there, rubbing your back as you dutifully ruin her silk blouse with salty tears and mascara. It only makes her hold you closer, until you're so curled up into her you can't tell where you end and she begins. The two of you have always kind of been that way, even before either of you knew it, you think, and laugh, and cry. She doesn't quite understand, and that's alright since you don't either. You're two sides of the same coin; but you match, and so you cannot exist with her around. It's just not possible, because your polarities are the same. You're both volatile chemicals and - maybe you're wrong about all of that.

There's no end or beginning for the either of you. Instead, you flow and connect. She holds you, like a drop of oil in a sea of possibilities, and yet her tides are still gentle enough that you can exist. But you tend to forget that you're also containing her; holding her back from being all-consuming, until you both just exist there. It's beautiful, in a moment where nothing should be. Instead of questioning that, you breathe in the smell of her skin, tilting your head out of the crook of her neck, and sloppily kiss her jaw. She does nothing, just turns her head to face you, her lashes dark, so you kiss her again and then she smiles before covering your broken skin and racing heart with her love. When your parents find you curled up into each other the next morning, they smile as parents do when finding their children sharing a tender moment.

Melissa is gone before you awaken, and the next time you see her she has a fiance.

_**(seven)**_

She can't do this to you; you've worked and worked to break the mould and she comes back into your life smiling just as much as ever, but her eyes are dark and taunting when she tells you her and Wren are moving into your loft. The warmth and tenderness is gone, and you're back to playing the parts your parents were pushing you into all along.

So you fuck Wren in the barn, in Melissa's bed, your face buried in the sheets. Her scent is all around you, the memory of her velvet voice in your ears even as her fiance is panting and cursing behind you as he comes. He pulls out without any consideration on your part. You wouldn't have let him continue, anyways. But nevertheless, you turn around and slap him, ordering him out, and like a scared little boy he does. You'd finish the job now yourself but the spell is broken and all you can smell is him. Instead you drag the bed out from the wall a couple of inches, pulling your car keys out of your bag as you do, and carve 'SPENCER WAS HERE' into the back of the headboard. As you leave, you swing by Melissa's bathroom and grab her bottle of perfume. She won't notice it's gone, but she certainly notices it when you start wearing it. You try to tell yourself that it's a trophy, and the headboard a warning. But then you remember that you can't recall a single thing from the whole ordeal aside from the memory of Melissa leaning over you the night Ali vanished. It's exactly a year to the day. And then you can't lie to yourself anymore.

_**(eight)**_

So you start distracting yourself instead. You're almost thankful for the emergence of -A, and you definitely are thankful that either they don't know anything about you and Melissa, or they've got enough sense not to touch that with a ten foot pole. But it can't last. The thing with Wren finally boils over, and Melissa all but flings his things out the window before dragging you into the barn and pushing you into a corner. She's angry, and you should take her seriously, but then she's so close and her eyes are bright and she's inhaling viciously in preparation for another bout of yelling… and then she yet again notices her perfume fragrancing your skin and now she knows. It's nothing as simple as you borrowing it and forgetting to give it back. It's deliberate, and so is the way her hand is positioned next to your head. Suddenly, she's grinding her hips against yours, her lips leaving bruises in their wake. When it's over and done with, she slaps you and kisses you again, then promptly kicks you out with your shirt only half-on. And that's how things go, until she gets engaged again and you get Toby. Then it's back to distracting for the both of you, it seems.

_**(nine)**_

It feels like there's half a second of time between Melissa announcing she's pregnant and Ian dying. And not long after that, she loses the baby. She comes to you for a strange kind of comfort both times - a blend of yelling and loving that must be criminal, even if what you've already done isn't. Still, things seem to have calmed down, to the point where it's almost normal. That is, until the sun sets and you find yourself outside the loft, without fail. But in the dark, shadows can turn into all sorts of different things, even when in the end the results are the same. Melissa's taken to painting your skin with her own tears, like that time you ruined her shirt so long ago. Sometimes, you even manage to tell her you love her under the light of the moon. The sun never sees such sights anymore. Somehow, it still feels like a lie, and you tell enough of those already nowadays.

_**(ten)**_

Years pass. You don't get into UPenn, much to the disappointment of your parents, but much to their surprise you do get into Stanford. It's a long ways away, but it's near San Francisco, and Melissa lets you live with her, rent free. Someone's got to look out for her little sister, after all, she explains to mom and dad with a politician's smile. It's more than worth the long commute, and it means staying out of Paige and Emily's way. Whenever you visit them these days, they look like they're a few seconds away from jumping each others' bones. You kind of wish you could judge them, but then, you're not exactly the poster girl for abstinence yourself, and you've got Melissa to blame for that much. You wouldn't trade her for the world, though, and though she'd never admit it, you know she feels the same. The only reminder you need lays directly behind you, and every night after Melissa has drifted off, you run your fingers along the backside of the headboard.

Spencer was here.


End file.
